Sundance
by Nagia
Summary: She rolls through life, shining brightly, and he rolls with her. A collection of mostlyunrelated short stories, following the themes of fun. Yuffentine.
1. III: Through, Into, Under, and Out of th

**Sundance**

**III: Through, Into, Under, and Out of that Damned Looking Glass**

**i.**

Vincent Valentine was not the kind you called a savoury character. Nor was he, in fact, the kind you approached under any circumstance other than desperation. Or unless you knew him very, very well.

That long dark hair, the black clothing, the red trench coat all screamed a message that warned most people off. His red eyes scared the people his hair or clothes didn't warn.

So did the freaking huge revolver.

But Yuffie Kisaragi didn't fear him. In fact, she didn't seem to care that he was a wanted man. Her chirpy exuberance made the world around her seem a little brighter. She always glossed over his chequered past (hah, more than chequered— it was downright _plaid_) by calling it "your boring story".

_Let's go to Niebelheim_, she'd said. _Who'd look for a wanted man in Niebelheim?_

That entire "hiding in plain sight" theory seemed to work well for her. Who would expect an extremely talented ninja to wear bright yellow and green, idiot fishnet stockings on only one leg, and yellow sneakers? And who would expect a wanted murderer to have neat black hair, well-tended clothing and travel in the company of a cheerful teenaged girl?

So they'd gone to Niebelheim, and now she was trying to fit in with the teenagers there. She was robbing houses blind of course, stealing random things as well as useful ones and then leaving them in other people's houses. It had been Yuffie who had turned the matriarchs of the Lockheart and Gainsborough houses against each other.

_And all over an idiotic teacup_, Vincent thought with a smirk. _Women are truly so strange..._

And she'd also turned Cid Highwind and Barrett Wallace against each other. Not through theft, this time. But rumours.

By the time the town realized just who had stolen so much from them, she and Vincent would be long hidden, and the town itself would be in a state of complete uproar.

"Come _on_, Vinnie!" Yuffie hissed.

Vinnie. He hated that nickname with a passion, or so he told her. In truth, it actually made him feel... Good. He liked that she bothered to shorten his name. It denoted some form of emotional attachment.

And so he followed her up the stairs to Shinra Mansion. The Shinra family, the townspeople said, had been a vicious family full of all sorts of hideous activities. Like Chaos-worship, human sacrifice, and incest. And then one day, the patriarch of the family, Guy Shinra, had allowed his eldest son (Rufus) to murder one of his younger sons.

After Reeve's death, the Shinra family had fallen apart, and the house was rumoured to be haunted.

They made their way through the darkened mansion. At length, they found some sort of secret passage.

"No signs of Chaos-worship anywhere!" Yuffie whined. "Why are all these damn things hoaxes?"

"Because Chaos-worshippers have the sense not to perform their rites where entire towns will learn of it," Vincent sighed.

He knew from experience.

"Oh. Okay. Well, maybe it'll be in the passage..."

He sincerely doubted it. The people of Niebelheim tended to blow things entirely out of proportion. He had never seen a group of people so prone to wild storytelling and exaggeration.

_Tell me why-y-y-y you cry and why you lie-ie-ie to me! Tell me why-y-y-y you cry, and why you lie-ie-ie to me! Well, I gave her everything I ha-ad, but she left me sittin' on my own..._

Vincent blinked. Where the hell had she learned that song? That was a song from his teen years, and that had been a good twelve years ago. None of the radio stations he knew of in Wutai played anything but modern rock.

**ii.**

He followed her until she reached a locked door.

"If there's anything good in this ratty place, it'll be in here." She nodded firmly.

When she tried to open it, however, it didn't budge. Not even under her expert kicks did the door shudder.

So he sighed and put his shoulder to it. Chaos had given him superhuman strength in exchange for a host to stay in. It had been Chaos who had forced him to kill.

Ever since meeting Yuffie, however, Chaos had gone disturbingly quiet. Vincent was used to Chaos stirring at every beautiful face, every sign of innocence unspoiled. Boys and girls and men and women, young, adult, elderly. Anything that lived and breathed, Chaos had wanted to destroy. And now that Yuffie was with him, Chaos had seemed to calm. He contented himself with the havoc that Yuffie wrought on almost everyone she encountered.

Before he unleashed the strength Chaos had given him, he only used the strength a normal man of build could use. The door shuddered, but did not react the way a less sturdy door might have.

He planted his shoulder to it again, this time using the strength Chaos had leant him. After a few shoulder-rams, the door flew inwards.

"Ladies first," Vincent murmured.

Yuffie smiled and pulled on his hair. She kissed him on the cheek and strode into the room he'd opened.

He couldn't help but watch the way her bottom shifted in those entirely too-short shorts. He'd seen other men react the same way to her, mesmerized not by her bust (which was, frankly, nothing to speak of) but by the way she walked. Her confidence made her seem years older than she was.

And then she opened her mouth and every man who'd stared at her inwardly cringed at what a disgusting pervert he was.

"Are you coming or not? There's, like, coffins in here! You gotta see 'em!"

Vincent moved after her. The room did indeed contain a coffin. Nothing but a coffin, in fact.

"Well, I guess we know where the cool stuff is at," Yuffie snickered. "These Shinra people sure had a hell of a sense of humour."

"This probably isn't a good idea, Yuffie."

"Aw, is Big Strong Vincent Valentine scared? What if it's a _zombie_!" She cackled.

"It's probably just a corpse, Yuffie. Opening the coffin will let the stench into the rest of the room."

"Hn, good point." Yuffie pulled a yellow scarf out of her bag and tied it around her mouth and nose. She tossed him his own scarf, a black one, and set to work opening the coffin.

He tied it around his face and sighed when she had trouble lifting the lid, even after she'd undone the whatever-they-were that held it closed. He strode forward to help her. The coffin lid was unusually heavy, he noted. His brief period of time working with a mortician told him that this was no ordinary coffin.

_It's like they wanted the corpse to stay in here,_ he thought, brow furrowing. Something wasn't right about this.

Corpses didn't move. Corpses didn't try to escape.

Had they buried someone alive?

With a groan, the two of them shoved the lid onto the floor.

The corpse sat bolt upright and stared at them with eerily blue eyes.

Yuffie squeaked and thrust herself against Vincent, wrapping her body up in his trench coat and whimpering nonsense.

"Oh my Gawd, Vinnie, oh my Gawd, oh my Gawd, oh my Gawd, Vinnie, it really is one!" She whimpered, even as the corpse said, "Thank god. I never thought I was going to get out. So, what are you doing down here, anyway?"

The corpse blinked. "Wait, what?"

"V-Vinnie, oh my Gawd, it really _is_ a zombie!"

The corpse went quiet. After a beat, he deadpanned, "Braaaains."

"OH MY GAWD!"

He laughed. "Sorry, sorry. I was just joking."

"Who are you?" Vincent asked.

"I'm Cloud Strife. Not too sure if the Strife family's still around here, though."

"Are you a zombie?"

"Nope. I'm perfectly alive. I think. Don't worry; I'm not going to eat your brains."

"You sure do talk a lot for a zombie..." Yuffie gave Cloud a hard look. "And you're really pale. Are you a vampire?"

Cloud was silent for a while. "I'm not going to suck your blood, either."

"Oh. Okay." Yuffie paused. "Hey, Vinnie, how long have we been in here?"

He checked his watch. "About an hour."

Yuffie grinned. "Oh, goodie. Looks like I win _this_ bet. Now Marlene gets to steal Cid's airship poster."

"Marlene? Barrett's younger sister? Yuffie, what are you doing?"

"Wreaking havoc. Havoc is fun, you know. You should try it sometime."

"_Why_ are you turning this town against itself? This is the first time you've done this."

Yuffie sighed. "I told you, Vinnie. To make sure that by the time they figured out that _I'm_ behind all the pranks around here, we're both long gone. And they'll have used an amazingly good deal of all their energy and shit fighting with _each other_."

And then she grinned. "I'm pulling off the greatest prank ever tonight, Vinnie. I'm robbing the candy store and greengrocers. I need a little sugar in my life, and it's probably not healthy to eat lots of candy without your veggies."

That was her code. _Candy store_ meant _materia shop_, and _greengrocers_, plural, referred to weapon and item shops. Materia was a thing she loved; money was a thing she needed.

She tugged on his hair again until he bent enough for her to reach. She nibbled on his ear and whispered, "I think it'd be a good idea to, you know, fill up the _Black Shadow_."

Ah, the Vincent _Black Shadow_. A Junon bike, so half the time, when he'd first bought it, it hadn't run. Very safe. But once he'd fucked around with the electrical system (god, Lucas Electric did shitty work)... Well, at least the headlight switches had the positions of "off, dim and bright" instead of "off, dim and flicker".

A few hours of Black magic tinkering with the engine later, it had actually started. And it ran steadily now.

Vincent nodded and whispered back, "I keep some cans of petrol tied up in the highest branches of The Tree, you know. It shouldn't be too hard."

Yuffie shrugged. "Just make sure nobody sees you."

He laughed bitterly at that. "Six months, Yuffie, and you still warn me of that. No one will see."

They never did. Only arachnophobes looked up consistently.

He thought to the bundles that hung in the only living tree left on the Shinra property. Yes, he could easily sneak those down. Something about him made people ignore him unless he was making his presence obvious.

Only children seemed to be immune to it, and adults rarely listened to children.

**Epilogue**

Yuffie's ill-gotten gains sit in a duffle bag, which she keeps tied behind him. The travel-bag, which contains their clothing and other supplies, he has strapped to the bike.

For once, he has buttoned his trench coat. She sits in front of him, but it is more like in his lap. He buttoned the coat around her, so that it now covers both them. There is more than enough room.

Her face presses up against his chest, her arms wrap around his waist. He can feel her tighten her arms as they take a sudden turn.

The wind whips through his hair. He can hear the wind screaming past them. It chills them both. This shouldn't be, because she is practically sitting his lap, with her arms and legs wrapped around him and the only thing an outsider could see of her is a slight lump in his coat. They are giving and sharing body heat.

Another sharp turn and her grip on him tighten.

He would wonder why she insisted on sitting like this when she could just put on a pair of pants and a coat and sit behind him, but he knows better. She is an adrenaline junkie, and this is a ridiculously dangerous position to ride in. She feels it every time he turns.

Over the wind, he can just barely hear her cry out in exhilaration.

**Note:** The Vincent _Black Shadow_ is a real bike. In fact, the _Black Shadow_ was the best Vincent there ever was.

Vincent was a British bike company, and because they were British, the bikes were terrible. Half the time they didn't run. Naturally, the Vincent motorcycle company went out of business ages ago.

Part of the bikes' unreliability was the circuitry— Lucas (the company that did the electrical systems) was total crap. I'm no mechanic, but I'm reasonably sure that you can't tinker around with the electrical systems of a motorcycle.

Of course, the bikes had other problems, too. So even if you (probably impossibly) managed to fix the electrical system, you were still fucked up the ass with a butcher knife and mustard for lube.

Of course, that didn't stop the bikes from being awesome. When they ran, the bikes were extremely fast. They were also sexy as all get-out.

This note brought to you by the letter G.

**Additional Note:** Not quite sure about this one. I wrote a good deal of it in fifteen minutes, but didn't finish, so I continued. I just couldn't find a good way to stop the epilogue. So I'm sorry the ending sucks.


	2. II: Icicle Town

**Sundance**

**II: Icicle Town**

Yuffie grinned as she went sliding down the slopes. Icicle Town had _loads_ of good ideas about fun things to do. On one of the other slopes, Cloud, Cid and Barrett were racing each other on snowboards. Night boarding had gotten immensely popular, apparently. Or maybe Cloud, Cid and Barrett (especially Cid and Barrett, the resident father-figure-types of AVALANCHE) just wanted to make sure that nothing funky happened to her, like some ride worker feeling her up or something.

Not that it was likely to happen, seeing as she'd shown up with _Vincent_, of all people.

She wiggled her fingers inside her mittens, grasping onto the rope handles as tightly as she could.

That rushing sensation as she went headlong down the _not_ what you called gentle slopes, whizzing along tracks of ice and snow. She skidded and she slid and the damn thing did 360 degree turns. It actually jumped, at one point. It was awesome. It tore a scream from her lips.

"YEEEEEEEEEE-HAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAW!"

She knew that Vincent was at the top of the slope, watching parents and children and friends and lovers slide down on their bellies attached to a rubber tube. Of course, he was probably lurking in the shadows somewhere, saying nothing. Just watching.

_Why did he even bother buying a pass?_ Yuffie wondered.

And then, with one last leap and jolt and skid across the snow, she reached the bottom of the slope. She had gone down one of the "expert tuber" slopes. Those who didn't have the balance or the balls to go down the longer, steeper slopes went down the "bunny tuber" slopes. Vincent was probably watching parents tube down alongside their children.

A resident of Icicle Town hooked her tube up to the lift thingie, flirting shamelessly with her as the lift pulled her tube back up towards the top of the slope. She giggled and flirted back, ignoring the dirty looks a bunch of other teenaged girls sent her.

She arrived back at the top, still laughing. Vincent appeared out of the shadows and helped her up. She hefted her tube and strode over to a pile of them. "Pick one," she said.

"What?"

He'd never sounded so confused before.

"I said pick one. Vincent, you can't come out here and just stand there... You've gotta at least have a _little_ fun, you know?"

Vincent sighed.

"Please, Vinnie? It's really fun. And I promise I won't tell anybody that you did it, if you don't want me to."

He sighed again, then picked a tube. Yuffie squealed and hugged him. "VINNIE'S GOING TO DO SOMETHING FUN, OHMYGAWD! WHOO-HOO!"

The same group of girls who'd glared at her before glared at her again. "Slut," one of them murmured. "Just take all the cute ones for yourself, why doncha?"

Yuffie blinked. _Wha?_

But she got over it, dragging Vincent over to the "bunny tuber" slope. "Okay, here's how we do this. We put our tubes down, and get on 'em. But instead of just holding onto our own tubes, we each hold onto each other's. Got it?"

Vincent nodded and pulled his tube to her tube's left.

"Oh. Right. Okay, you ready?"

He nodded. And then they were going _down, down, down_. Vincent's right hand gripped her strap so tightly that his knuckles turned even whiter than normal— she could see that much through the random holes in his gloves. She gripped his strap hard, too, screaming at the fun of it.

"Pull up your legs, stupid!" She shouted. "Stop trying to brake."

He stopped trying to brake, and they went whizzing down the hillside. Yuffie could have sworn she saw his lips turn up into a smile.


	3. I: Babygesitten

**Note: **Chapter title comes from an American high school student's attempt at conjugating the German verb "babysitten" (to baby-sit) into the past tense. He came to me and asked me which sounded better: "Babygesitten", "Babygesatten", or "gebabysitten". I do not need to be a native German speaker (and I'm not) to be absolutely certain that all three of these are wrong.

****

**Sundance**

**I: Babygesitten**

He wonders briefly if she is listening to him. He doubts it. She doesn't seem to listen to anybody overmuch. She is too bright, too cheerful, too happy and chirping to listen to his morbid thoughts.

And even when she hears, she does not understand.

He wonders why he follows her— and it is _him_ following _her_, not the other way around, it was never, could never be, the other way around. She is not a following type of person. She is a running person. She is a going-away person.

_Going away and going away and maybe someday here to stay._

That is an old song, one from well over thirty-five years ago. So why is she humming it as she leads him through this godforsaken forest? How does she know it? It hasn't been popular since he was a boy, he is sure.

"Are you sure about this?" He asks.

"Come _on_, Vinnie!" She pauses only long enough to shoot him some sort of look. It is a very teenaged look. It says, what is your problem and are you kidding at the same time. It also says, ha-ha, you're stupid. "Spelunking is fun! You _know_ that!"

He strongly suspects that she is an adrenaline junkie. He has known more than a few in his lifetime. Cloud shows similar symptoms, but at least Cloud is a grown man with a grown man's sense of self control. He doesn't rush off to go snowboarding willy-nilly, without contacting anybody.

If Godo hadn't hired him to make sure Yuffie didn't get herself killed in some ridiculous and embarrassing accident (andwhy _him?_ Vincent wonders every night), Yuffie would likely be dead.

"This is unwise," Vincent tells her. "You have no idea what is in that cave. You're carrying Twin Viper instead of a decent weapon."

She says nothing. She never responds when he tries to warn her.

_My life is a hollow lie_, Vincent thinks. Of course, he has thought that his life was a hollow lie since he woke from the coffin, but this is even more ridiculously symptomatic of "hollow lie" than usual. He is nothing more than an overgrown babysitter for a bratty ninja he barely knows.

He used to be... Well, he used to be a man. Now he's a broken shell of a man who tails along after an idiot seventeen year old girl. A babysitter; and a bad one at that. After all, it's his fault that she's taken an interest in spelunking. And you could probably trace her burgeoning interest in bungee-jumping and parachuting back to him, as well.

Thank god she hasn't tried it yet. He'll follow her to the ends of the Planet, because he said he would, but he really, _really_ does not want to follow her over a cliff with a cord tied to his ankle. Or out of an airship.

Not that he's afraid of heights. He likes heights. He's jumped out of airships before, and he's jumped off cliffs before. He's done these things both with and without parachutes or bungee cords.

He's supposed to be keeping her safe. And one could argue that jumping out of an airship is not a safe activity, no matter _how_ sure you are that the parachute will open. Neither is jumping off a cliff— no matter how sturdy the bungee cord is.

"At least let me go first."

She says nothing. She is playing the "I've gone temporarily deaf and can't hear a word you say— and even if I could, I wouldn't care, nyuck-nyuck!" game again.

"Why do I bother?"

"Because I'm one hell of a foxy little kunoichi?" He can tell from her voice that she is grinning. "Plus, you promised my dad. And he's paying you."

And they have reached the cave, and she is setting up her cables, and he is making sure that everything is tied tight enough.

And then she rappels down into the darkness, shrieking with exhilaration as she goes. He follows her, wondering what prompted him to introduce her to this sport.


End file.
